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Oracle OpenWorld focused attention on the new Oracle Cloud Platform offerings - particularly in the IaaS space. Gartner selected AWS and Azure as leaders in IaaS, while Oracle didn't place in the latest Magic Quadrant. InfoQ spoke with AWS and Azure experts about the future of Oracle Cloud.

As software projects grow in complexity and size, it has increased the resource demands imposed on programmer's toolsets. Visual Studio is no exception, and these increased demands combined with its ever-growing feature set means that it is feeling constrained. In this article we will examine how Microsoft is trying to overcome the 32-bit nature of VS15's main process.

Google recently announced .Net support for Google Cloud APIs. This includes C# bindings and PowerShell cmdlets. A Visual Studio extension is also available, allowing to browse Google Cloud resources and to deploy Asp.Net applications on Google Compute Engine.

Earlier this month, Microsoft added support for their serverless event driven platform, Azure Functions, within the Azure IoT Gateway SDK. This addition provides a cloud-based extensibility point for developers building IoT solutions on top of Azure.

Throughout the technical preview phase of the Visual Studio “15” development process, Microsoft has stated that one of their primary goals is to improve performance. Today we will examine the changes made to give VS “15” a faster startup time with the goal of getting the main IDE to a usable state as quickly as possible.

As the development of Visual Studio “15” has progressed, Microsoft has continued to discuss the efforts it is taking to improve both the execution speed and the size of the installed application. The fifth preview brings more evidence of these improvements along with some key usability enhancements to the IDE.

Microsoft has released TypeScript 2.0, with Simplified Declaration File Acquisition, Non-nullable Types and Readonly modifiers.
The release delivers close ECMAScript spec alignment, wide support for JavaScript libraries and tools, and a language service that powers a first class editing experience in all major editors.

Choosing compilation targets was a relatively straightforward operation prior to .Net Core. Developers now face several possibilities and choosing a target is not so obvious anymore. To understand the big picture in .Net Core, the key concepts are: target framework monikers and .Net Standard.

Rob Eisenberg, the creator of Aurelia, the alternative JavaScript framework, has taken a job with Microsoft leaving some in the community to wonder how well supported Aurelia will be in the future. Members of the Aurelia team have said that there should not be a big change.

Real-time analysis of event streams has a new focus in Big Data platforms, both on-premise and in the cloud. AWS have released Amazon Kinesis Analytics, a rival to Azure StreamAnalytics. Both platforms use a simple SQL language for complex querying, and move Big Data analysis into a SaaS-like space.

Don Syme, creator of F#, presented at .Net Fringe 2016 an assessment of the current status of F#. He also commented on the duality that exists in F#, a functional language created on a runtime built for object oriented languages.

The routine creation of XAML data entry forms can be tedious, but thanks to a new Visual Studio extension this process can be streamlined. XAML Power Toys for Visual Studio 2015 provides a way for developers to quickly create data entry forms using XAML for WPF or Xamarin forms applications. With UWP app support coming, this is an all-in-one tool that supports all major WPF use-cases.

Microsoft has released the TypeScript 2.0 release candidate. One of the most important updates in Typescript's release candidate is its tagged unions. "Tagged unions make it way easier to get type safety using JavaScript patterns you’d write today," says Daniel Rosenwasser, Typescript program manager.